Sherry Li's Blog

Need to check the last time when our ETL processes ran successfully Data warehouse developers routinely query the last data date (the last date when we have fact data) to check the last time when our ETL processes ran successfully. It’s not hard to d...

Continuing from MDX #18 – Easy to concatenate row values into column in MDX. I have not accomplished the goal of concatenating the set of top resellers in each country. Count() function can count the number of tuples in a set In this query, I am add...

Having worked with SSAS for a while and done some reporting with MDX queries, I started to explore opportunities to write SSAS “stored procedures”. I stumbled on a few blocks along the way to even set up the development environment properly before I got...

Concatenating row values (within groups) into column in SSRS and TSQL Concatenating row values into column is a never ending topic for report developers. It should be a simple task. That is, if the rows are not within groups. If the rows you are about ...

For the purpose of this blog, my answer is 4. I’ve always wanted to do a benchmark comparison so I can proudly say that my “normal” way is the best in terms of run time. STAGE-TSQL: Use the data flow to bring the raw data into staging, and us...

In SSRS, we often have another challenge. That is to control the column name. Continuing from MDX #16 – Attribute [Month Name] Is Invisible. With this MDX query, we got two columns back from the Query Designer in SSRS. The column [Month Name] represen...

In SSRS user-defined hierarchy Calendar returns the entire hierarchy Continuing from my previous post, MDX #15 – Why do I get Year, Semester, Quarter when I only need Month?. The above query gave me the months and each month’s sales amount in SSMS, ...

User-defined hierarchies define one-to-many relationships between attributes in a dimension, and these relationships tell the MDX engine how to roll up measure values. User-defined hierarchies in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services define the attrib...

Descendants() function gives me the exact level in the Date hierarchy in SSMS In MDX #14, I used this query to get the internet sales amount for each month. The results above are from SSMS, and they are what I was expecting. In SSRS, the same MDX q...

In a previous post, MDX #11 – How to get number of cars each customer owned using Properties() function?, I used the Properties() function to get the number of cars each customer owned. There must be another way Is that the only way? We (programmers/d...